Recently Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service has become popular with consumers, with more people and businesses choosing to migrate to it and away from traditional Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) every year. VoIP service is a telephone service that uses the Internet to make telephone calls, usually for a fixed fee and a very low per-minute charge, even for some international calls. VoIP systems can be either hardware-based, with special telephone sets or adapters for regular phones in communication with a network router, or software-based, thereby allowing a user to employ a personal computer as a telephone.
Software-based VoIP phones are sometimes referred to as “softphones,” and they vary from service to service. Attention has recently been focused on providing softphone functionality in web browser plug-ins. In another example, a stand-alone program is used to support VoIP communication. This can make softphone functionality difficult for developers of web pages and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to leverage, since a developer who desires to implement phone technology in an application will generally have to rely on the functionality provided by a web browser plug-in or other program with little flexibility for User Interface (UI) concerns or application-specific concerns. Further, since there are different browser plug-ins available, not every application will work with every browser. There is no solution currently on the market that gives developers control over real-time communication functionality and can be nearly universally useable.